I was working on a particular task for a project in my master branch. I made some changes to file demo.php. I wanted to revert the changes, so i deleted the file(rm -fr demo.php). I didn’t commit this change.

Now i was confused since i didn’t know how to recover the file.

Normally, there can be two scenarios of retrieving a file.

1) Retrieve a deleted file and the change has not been committed.

Find the deleted files

git ls-files --deleted

In this case, simply use following command

git checkout

2) Retrieve a deleted file and file has been committed.

First you need to find the commit id

git log #or git rev-list -n 1 HEAD --

You’ll get a list of logs. Grab the latest commit id. and then

git checkout ^ -- ;

Your file will be retrieved.